Your Church Property Has a Mission Too – Transcript
Jim Latimer
Welcome to Coaching for Interims. We are about empowerment for interim ministry, best practices and quick help – wisdom from the field. This is our collaborative Wisdom from the Field project, featuring short interviews with transitional interim ministers, and others, with practical help and wisdom to offer those engaged in transitional ministry. Thank you for tuning into this episode of wisdom from the field.
Jim Latimer
And today, I’m delighted to welcome back Reverend Dr. Shelley Stackhouse. Shelley’s long career in ministry is remarkable. She has served as a Senior Pastor, a Solo pastor, and an Interim Transitional pastor. She now serves full-time as the Senior Director of Programs for Partners for Sacred places, and lives in Philadelphia. And a lot of us are serving in churches who have big, beautiful buildings, and we kind of don’t know what to do with them anymore. And we can’t afford them. And so, what do we do? And she’s got a lot to say to that. So, Shelly, what’s top of mind for you right now around buildings and that issue, especially as a transitional person?
Shelly Stackhouse
Thanks, Jim. This is so great to have an opportunity to talk with you again. The work that you do is so important. And the work that interims ministers do, and transitional ministers, and designated ministers all these words now that we have to talk about someone who is short-term in a parish. Although I just talked to somebody who was five years as a transitional. And I thought that’s not really transitional.
Shelly Stackhouse
Anyway, so, here’s one of the things that I think is so important about talking about buildings and property – the fullness of property – as an interim. You have the opportunity in the interim work to help a congregation to begin to assess clearly the situation of their property. We find in our work that so many congregations, even vital congregations, have way more property than they need. And post pandemic, that’s even more obvious.
Shelly Stackhouse
I was just talking with an interim pastor, as a matter of fact, in a congregation in the Midwest, they have a three-story Education building that is completely empty, seven days a week. They’re maintaining it still. They’re paying to maintain it but they don’t need it. So, sometimes it’s an opportunity to look at the fullness of property and say, Hey, this is the property we’re using. How are we using it? How often? Are we using it? Who’s using it? Is it us? Is it the community? What are the spaces that could be used more fully? And is there property that maybe it’s time for us to offload – either to sell or to get an anchor tenant to lease it? There are lots of options along those lines.
Shelly Stackhouse
An interim pastor has the opportunity to – and indeed, I would say that the call as part of the interim work – to help people not only be clear about the character of the congregation, and what their past trajectory and future trajectory is, but the property as well. What’s the legacy of the property? What’s the future of the property? And how do we go about making decisions around that future?
Jim Latimer
It’s kind of like our property as part of the Who are we? interim time question. Really include that into the Who are we?
Shelly Stackhouse
Exactly! We talk about the fact that a lot of congregations have mission statements and vision statements. And if they don’t, they should. And it should actually be something that means something not, you know, we want to serve Jesus, which is wonderful, but doesn’t really tell us anything. However, most of those mission and vision statements don’t say anything about the property. And we believe the property is a vehicle for your mission. And, in fact, we say the property itself has a mission. And one of the things sometimes we work with congregations on is developing what we call a Property Mission Statement. What is it that you understand the purpose of this property to be in terms of your mission as a congregation?
Jim Latimer
A Property Mission Statement? I love it!
Shelly Stackhouse
Because then that helps you make decisions about what’s appropriate use of the property. You know, do you want to sell this excess Education Building to a random developer who’s willing to take it off your hands and build luxury condominiums. Is that what the mission of that building is intended to be? Or are there other options that you might want to explore in the community? So that to me is a critical thing – to understand the property as part of mission. And in what particular way does the congregation see that being operational. You can start that by going room to room, literally, room to room in a building. And don’t ignore the property outside. If you own land if there’s even a grassy area or a parking lot. Talk about why was this built in the first place, by the ancestors. Whether those ancestors are 300 years ago, or 50 years ago? Why was it built? What was its purpose? How has it been used over the years? How is it being used now? And what can we imagine for the future? So, it’s an act of imagination as much as anything else.
Jim Latimer
Shelley, thank you. Say those three again. I love the focus. This is so concrete. We’ve got this big beautiful building. It’s half empty. One of the reasons we don’t deal with it is because it’s just too big. And there’s all this emotion attached to it. There’s a stained-glass window that our great grandmother had made. Her name is in it! How do we deal with it?
Shelly Stackhouse
Right. And if Tiffany or Lafarge made them, it’s even more challenging. I mean, they’re wonderful. I served the church that had five Tiffany windows. So, I mean, it’s more of a challenge. And they’re beautiful. And they’re amazing. And during the pandemic, for me, as an interim of this congregation, I would do services – you know, in the beginning, during the pandemic, we were sitting there with our computers. And I would do it with my camera facing one of those Tiffany windows. And it was really important to the congregation.
Shelly Stackhouse
So, the things that I said before that you wanted me to repeat before I get off target here. So, go to a room or to an outside space and say, Why was this originally built? Why did the ancestors make this? What was their intent? How has it been used in the past? And how is it being used right now? Or not used. And then begin to imagine. And often that imagining needs to happen with partners in the community. And that’s the other thing, Jim, about it being big, is that a lot of congregations and clergy are afraid to take on the property, because they feel like this is way too big for them. They’re alone. This is hard. Yes, all of that is true, except the part about being alone. And congregations forget, and sometimes clergy forget that there are people in the community who are stakeholders in that property. Some of those stakeholders are people who may use it, right? So, you know, you’ve got the AAA group. You have daycare. You have the yoga group. You’ve got somebody who’s using that. But beyond that even, all of the neighbors are stakeholders in what happens to this property. Other folks in the city, or town or village or rural area, are stakeholders in what happens to this property. And many of them, we find in our work, are eager to be partners with the congregation in helping to figure this out! And sometimes even helping to fund it. And then there are folk like Partners, and in the UCC, there’s the UCC Building and Loan. There are all sorts of other folks on the outside who are eager to be partners – that’s why we have that name – with you, in trying to figure all this out and implement it for the good of the mission, whether or not the congregation continues to own and control the property.
Jim Latimer
Yes. Which has got to be on the table.
Shelly Stackhouse
That’s got to be on gotta be on the table. It’s got to be on the table. And you alluded to one of the other hard parts about this, which I just want to mention, and that is the grief. You know, people look at this. My grandfather gave this. I’m so attached to this. And in our congregations, often, the folk who are having to make these decisions – because of the demographics of our congregations are my age or older and I was born the same year as the United Church of Christ, 1957 babies – so, there are people who are at a stage of their life when grief sometimes is their constant companion. People that they knew and loved. My mother is 88 and Tony Bennett just died. And he was her absolute all-time favorite singer. She met him once. She heard him sing in a small club in Cleveland when she was a teenager. And this this sort of constant little grief, in addition to the larger griefs of losing control of your life, often, or over your body is a real issue. And so, these are the same folks now that are looking at their church, and finding yet another source of grief and loss as they’re unable to do what they once did, as the church is unable sometimes to afford to maintain this structure and this property the way it wants to.
Shelly Stackhouse
So, the for the interim, all of those interim task things, all of that training, everything about grief work, this is classic grief work that needs to be done, and instead of on an individual basis, it needs to be done with an entire congregation. I talk to clergy all the time about doing this in preaching, doing it in Bible studies, Sometimes it’s really easy for us to think, Oh, these people are just making an idol of this place. And it’s way more complicated than that. Way more complicated than that. And if we just disparage them, then we’re losing an opportunity to bring them along.
Jim Latimer
Yes. Some empathy there. Some empathy can go a long way. That’s so important.
Shelly Stackhouse
Yes. It can enable you to do the work you need to do.
Jim Latimer
And when you go into that grief space, when you’re willing to empathize, which means feel some of their pain rather than write it off as, They’re idolizing! which may be true, but that’s kind of beside the point.
Shelly Stackhouse
It is beside the point.
Jim Latimer
The fact is, they’re grieving because they’re experiencing loss. And if we as pastor, or transition pastor, or interim pastor, in this particular case, if we’re willing to share some of that grief, and some of that suffering that’s real for them, then in my experience, they’re much more likely to kind of move through it. Not that it goes away, but they’re much more likely to let go of something that maybe they had been holding on to, and maybe in somehow hindering a process that we might think is kind of inevitable, but now that they’re seeing, Oh, this person understands the sacrifice that I’m being asked to make. And people will often make sacrifices that we would think they would never make if they – and this is purely subjective – if they think that the person asking them to make the sacrifice understands the nature of their sacrifice. If they’re convinced of that, often, they will make sacrifices that are breathtaking.
Shelly Stackhouse
That’s why you ask them to tell stories. So, when you’re walking around, when you go into that Sunday School room, and somebody remembers, Miss Jones, who taught Sunday School to their children who are now in their 60s, and how wonderful she was, and the amazing kind of things that she did. Or they walk into the Sanctuary, you get all the stories about, you know, My kids were baptized here. I was married here. My husband’s funeral was here. And the pastors that were meaningful to them in the past. And when you get those stories out, this is what you do an individual grief work, right? You ask people to tell stories about the person they’ve lost. And so, you’re doing the same thing here. You’re asking for stories. And in the telling of those stories often, Jim, exactly what you said happens – people then feel that that’s been honored that the past has been honored. And now, maybe not. And now we can imagine a future in which that same mission might be engaged in a different way and with different people.
Jim Latimer
Well, that’s a perfect line to end with here – to allow them / us to imagine a future that is different than…I won’t try to say what you just said perfectly. Shelly, thank you for the generosity of your thoughts. Great conversation! I look forward to another one at some point because these are fabulous, and they’re very popular.
Shelly Stackhouse
Thanks Jim. Take care everybody. Bye bye.
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